Against the grain

A few Manitoba ranchers are breeding cattle back to their natural, grass-fed state. Here's why

Bill Redekopp, October 26, 2013, Winnipeg Free Press

A decade ago, when BSE devastated cattle economics in Canada, the Bouw family had a collective epiphany.

The Bouws are cattle farmers. They raised cattle and ran a feedlot on which they fed the decades-old conventional diet of barley and corn to other people's cattle to raise them to slaughter weight.

A grain diet speeds weight gain so cattle get to market faster. It also produces larger animals. But cows are ruminants with four stomachs designed to digest grass, not grain. A rich grain diet causes cattle to contract diarrhea, and for some it becomes a chronic condition. The cattle also suffer acidosis, a very bad form of acid reflux.

To prevent cattle catching disease in this compromised state, and because feedlots keep cattle in close quarters where a disease can spread quickly and result in financial ruin, cows are fed antibiotics mixed into their feed as soon as they arrive as a preemptive strike.

But studies have begun showing those antibiotics can transfer to humans eating cooked meat. The fear is human overexposure to antibiotics could lead to resistant strains of bacteria. The United States Department of Agriculture recently recommended feedlots cut down their use of antibiotics.

The BSE crisis -- the discovery of a single cow with mad cow disease in 2003 that made Canadian beef a pariah internationally for a time -- caused a huge reassessment within the Bouw family. Family members saw themselves as addicts -- addicted to throwing money at big agriculture for an endless supply of feed supplements, antibiotics and growth hormones. The way to kick the habit was standing right in front of them, and under them, and all around them: grass. Just grass.

Photo: Ken Gigliotti, Winnipeg Free Press

Today, Bouw brothers Jonathan and Stefan, along with parents Herman and Marilyn, don't just raise grass-fed beef on their farm near Anola, about 25 kilometres east of Winnipeg. They are re-breeding the cattle to get them back to their natural, grass-fed genetics so other ranchers can raise them. They are at the epicentre of the grass-fed beef movement.

Please read the entire article by clicking here.

- Submitted by Sara

To Reap, Thou Shall Tweet

(by Brenda Suderman, Winnipeg Free Press, Oct. 26, 2003)

When it comes to social change and political engagement, Allison Chubb believes the millennial generation has a thing or two to teach their elders about communicating ideas.  "In this particular case, we need to listen to those who come after us and allow them to take the reins," explains the University of Manitoba chaplain and youth outreach worker.

Gareth and Bob (photo: Glowacki)

 Although she's only 27, the Anglican chaplain at St. John's College found she had to adapt to the ways teenagers communicate and stay connected. Because millennials communicate mostly by text or social media, Chubb says their elders need to acknowledge -- and even embrace -- how these new media are vital in creating community for that demographic.

"There's this whole wing of Christianity that has this idea that social media is purely bad and should be resisted," says Chubb, an ordained Anglican deacon headed for the priesthood.  "As Christians, we believe God is the creator of both culture and community."

Chubb speaks about social media and how it can be a tool of the church -- and yes, even of God -- to provoke social change at the upcoming Faith in the City I conference, which runs Friday, Nov. 1 to Sunday, Nov. 3 at Augustine United Church, 444 River Ave.

The three-day ecumenical conference grew out of a 20-member justice study group at the Osborne Village church (http://justlivingaugustineuc.blogspot.ca/), which explores issues such as fair trade, environmentalism and political engagement, explains conference organizer Gareth Neufeld.
"We want to bring a justice-seeking faith voice into the life of a congregation in the heart of the city," he explains.

"Most of the voices (at the conference) are exploring this question: To what extent ought Christians to rely on politics to bring about the just and peaceful world God is intending?"

Neufeld has lined up some of the city's social-justice heavy hitters, including David Northcott of Winnipeg Harvest, former NDP MLA Marianne Cerilli, now of the Social Planning Council, city councillor Jenny Gerbasi and Geez magazine editor Aiden Enns.

For Bill Blaikie, a former NDP provincial cabinet minister and MP and an ordained United Church minister, the question is not whether people of faith are engaged in the political process, but how they do it.  "The prophetic tradition of the Bible is the prophets and Jesus speaking truth to power," says Blaikie, who delivers the keynote address 7 p.m. Friday.  "But in a democracy, should churches be speaking to the government or should churches be speaking to the people?"

Sometimes, the conversation doesn't even go that far, he laments.  "I think churches speak to their own people, but do they try to speak to anyone else?" asks Blaikie.  "There's a lot of preaching to the converted."

And there's also a lot of preaching about how things once were, adds Chubb, which isn't the way to engage the generation of Idle No More and the Occupy movements. She says the organizers of those recent social movements understood how to connect, but older generations experienced in social justice can help them focus and articulate their positions.  "There's enough of a cultural shift (that) 'Do it the way we do it' just isn't going to work," says Chubb.

brenda@suderman.com

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 26, 2013 D12

- submitted by Gareth

Clothes on your back: Inside Cambodia's garment industry

This article, from the Toronto Star, takes us to Cambodia, whose garment industry is not as  big as Bangladesh's, but just as critical to its economy.  I've selected just a few small excerpts here, in part to reflect the seeming roller-coaster of progress, followed by regress.  Please read the entire Star article here.



Excerpt 1:  Moch (Moch and Sar are sisters) starts work at 7 a.m., sewing T-shirt sleeves until eight or nine in the evening, six days a week. She is given a one-hour break for lunch at 11. Her sewing quota is 950 shirts a day. For every 100 shirts above the quota she is paid an additional 25 cents. After adding the two or three hours of overtime, shift after shift, Moch can boost her monthly earnings to $130. Both Moch and Sar work under short-term contracts. Contracts for some workers run as short as three months. The sisters say theirs run for a year.

Four-fifths of Cambodia's exports are garments, from factories like this one southeast of Phnom Penh. 
Isabelle Lesser/Associated Press

Excerpt 2:  But Clinton was right about one thing. “We know sweatshop labour will not vanish overnight,” he said. That was April 1997.  Two years later, the bilateral agreement with Cambodia set a new standard.  It was a huge step forward.  Followed by a giant step backward.  Along with the expiry of the bilateral agreement at the end of 2004, Cambodia was fast-tracked to join the World Trade Organization. Under pressure from the garment industry, Better FactoriesCambodia (BFC) changed its reporting methods. As garment factories spread like wildfire in Phnom Penh and as garment exports exploded, transparency was abandoned.

Excerpt 3:  David Welsh is the Cambodia country director for the Solidarity Center, the international labour rights organization launched by the AFL-CIO in 1997. “Stakeholders who benefit most from the presence of the Better Factories program, namely the brands, the government and the industries, have been pushing this notion that if you’re the average consumer in Washington, Toronto or London you’re not to be blamed for thinking, well, the ILO is monitoring every factory there. Surely when they unearth infractions something’s done about those findings. That is exactly not the case. Quite the opposite. So it’s a real misnomer. They’re doing a great job monitoring. But it’s not within their mandate, deliberately not within their mandate, to do anything beyond that . . . I can tell you first hand, all the data that’s given to the government, to the brands and to the factories — it’s virtually always the case that never is any proactive measure taken unless they’re pressured to do so.”

You can read the entire Star article here.

-submitted by Gareth 

New Brunswick fracking protests are the frontline of a democratic fight

Images of burning cars and narratives about Canadian natives breaking the law obscure the real story about the Mi'kmaq people's opposition to shale gas exploration

Excerpts of this Guardian article have been published here.  To read the entire article, click here.

 

A girl plays the drums as she sings a traditional First Nations song during an anti shale gas demonstration in Montreal in support of the Mikmaq people of Elsipogtog First Nations in New Brunswick. Photograph: Oscar Aguirre/Demotix/Corbis

Excerpt 1:  The image of burning police cars played endlessly on the evening news. Television and talk radio blared out reports of "clashes" between police and indigenous protestors. Last Thursday in New Brunswick near the Elsipogtog First Nation, we were told the government had enforced an injunction against a blockade of a US shale gas company. There was nothing about the roots of a conflict years in the making. An appeal to the stereotype of indigenous violence was enough: once again, the natives were breaking the law; the police had to be sent in. Catching the headlines, Canadian could shake their heads and turn away their gaze.

But smoke and flames from police cars can only hide the truth for so long. The exact chronology is not yet settled, but this much is clear: on Thursday morning someone in government sanctioned the Canadian police to invade a peaceful protest site like an army. In a dawn raid, snipers crawled through the forest, putting children and elders in their cross-hairs. Police carried assault rifles and snarling dogs, and sprayed tear gas and shot rubber-type bullets. The result was predictable: shocked and enraged people, a day ending in chaos.

There is only one reason the police were unleashed. Not because of the New Brunswick Premier's claims about the dangers of an "armed encampment"; protestors had been unswervingly non-violent for months. Ever since 2010, when New Brunswick handed out 1.4 million hectares of land – one-seventh of the province – to shale gas exploration, opposition had been mounting. Petitions, town hall meetings, marches on legislature had slowly transformed to civil disobedience, and in October, to the blockade of equipment that Texan SNW Resources was using for seismic testing. The company was losing $60,000 daily, and the non-violent defiance had put a wrinkle in the Premier's plans for a resource boom. The blockade had to go.

Excerpt 2:   "It is our responsibility to protect Mother Earth, to protect the land for non-natives too," says Susan Levi-Peters, the former Chief of Elsipogtog. "My people are speaking up for everyone." Others have heard. Since the beginning of the summer, Levi-Peters has seen indigenous Maliseet, Acadians and anglophone New Brunswickers drawn to this new epicentre of resistance on her community's traditional lands. "People care about the water. People care about the environment. This isn't just a native issue."

But let's be clear about one way this is a "native issue": the rush underway for dirtier and more extreme fossil fuels and minerals, in New Brunswick and across Canada, is just the latest stage of colonial pillage. It's a badly-kept secret that Canada's oil, gas and mineral wealth, the key to Prime Minister Stephen Harper's reckless resource obsession, are mostly on Indigenous lands. And if industry is to have them, the country's national myths must be summoned. In last week's Speech from the Throne, Harper praised the "courage and audacity" of the country's "pioneers," who "forged an independent country where non would have otherwise existed." A day later, the raid on Elsipogtog was effectively a footnote.

Excerpt 3:  Freed of the distractions, we will be left with a single question. Do we obey provincial dictates that grant a company license to pollute the water? Or the laws of Indigenous peoples, of the Supreme Court, and of our conscience, calling us to protect it? The answer will tell us everything about the kind of country we will have.

To read the entire article,  click here.

-submitted by Gareth

Bangladesh Accord appoints its leadership team

This is very exciting!

Brad Loewen, an administrator with the City of Winnipeg, has just been appointed the Chief Safety Inspector for the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Banglades.  He'll be moving to Bangladesh at the beginning of December to do his work.  This is from the press release:

“Brad Loewen’s task is central to all that we want to achieve. Under his experienced leadership, the Accord will establish and apply safety standards to all factories that supply to Accord member brands. It is a mammoth task but one in which Brad will have the capacity and authority to make decisions that will make direct, positive impacts upon the safety of Bangladeshi garment workers.”

Larry, an acquaintance of mine, is a good friend of Brad's.  This is from an email from Larry:  "Brad is off on Dec 1 to Dakka. A very interesting chance to make a difference. The consortium flew him first class to London England a couple of weeks ago, and from he tells me, the unions, the government, and the consortium all okayed his hiring. In fact he was the unanimous choice. Now for the next five years he has to try and change the world. Exciting stuff."

You can read the entire release here.

Click here to go to the home page of the Accord.

What about those A&W Hamburgers being ethical?

Laura Rance is editor of the Manitoba Co-operator, and writes a column in the Winnipeg Free Press called "Rural Revival".  This column was published Oct. 12, 2013.  It addresses the issue raised in a recent Just Living post focusing on A&W's claims of offering ethical, sustainable beef in its hamburgers.  A number of years ago, Laura Rance was keynote speaker at an Eco-Friendly Dinner, sponsored by Project Peacemakers. 

A&W's 'better beef' boast challenged by producers

Chain switches to meat without hormones, steroids

Laura Rance
(photo source:  Ag in the City, 2011)

Anyone who frequents the cereal aisle or yogurt department in a major grocery store learns pretty quickly success or failure in the food business comes down to the ability to differentiate.

Through varying recipes, packaging and marketing, the name of the game is to give customers the perception -- if not the reality -- that your product is the best.

Product differentiation can be emotional as well as tangible. For example, free-range eggs don't look or taste any different than conventional ones. The price may be higher, but there's a market for them among customers who like the idea of the animals that produce their food having a life too. Different cereals have varying quantities of sugar and fibre, relative to whether the target is children or seniors.
So it goes in the burger business, where the battle for customers has moved beyond offering the most food for the lowest price to extracting value from differentiating products based on consumer preference.

In this vein, fast-food giant A&W announced recently from here on in it would only buy beef raised without hormones and steroids. What's more, it's buying from producers willing to operate that way, whether or not they are Canadian.

As marketing ploys go, it's a gamble for Canada's second-biggest hamburger chain. Beef purchased from sources not using these production aids will likely cost the chain more without providing any noticeable differences in the product consumers eat. Its value is purely based on whether consumers believe it's better. Hence the slogan "Better beef."

A&W doesn't say its beef is safer or more nutritious; it simply says it's better, based on what it is hearing from its customers.

"What we've observed from our customers is there is a lot more interest in the food they're eating, where it comes from," A&W's chief marketing officer Susan Senecal said in a Reuters report. "We've discovered that things like no hormones, no steroids are very, very important to our customers, remarkably so."

Growth promoters are widely used in the North American beef business because they create more beef more quickly with less feed. That means fewer animals, lower costs and a smaller environmental footprint.

Europe and several other major importers don't accept them. Just last summer, processors in North America stopped accepting cattle treated with a growth promoter called Zilmax when meat-plant auditors noticed cattle treated with it had difficulty walking. A&W is among several major food retailers in North America moving to offer customers the hormone-free option.

Meanwhile, organizations representing cattle producers across the country are pulling out all the stops to defend current production practices. They point out these promoters have been used for nearly four decades with no known detrimental human health effects. Without naming A&W directly, the Canadian Cattlemen's Association issued a terse statement assuring Canadians all beef is perfectly safe.

A recent Manitoba Beef Producers opinion piece worried about "foodie trends" and strategic marketing efforts that mistakenly romanticize past production methods as healthier, and which "want to push producers and farmers back to the rural lifestyle and production practices of the 1940s and 1950s. In other words, houses with no running water, wood heat, a standard of living below poverty, one-room school education, even longer work hours, etc."

Alberta Beef Producers (ABP) also chimed in, saying hormone-free beef "is different from the vast majority of beef that is produced in Canada, but in our view, it is certainly not better beef." It goes on to criticize these companies for seeking supplies from off-shore if local sources can't be found.
"We are disappointed these companies are effectively turning their backs on over 68,000 Canadian cattle producers and more than two billion pounds of safe, nutritious, high-quality Canadian beef that is produced annually from cattle raised using highly ethical and sustainable methods."

There are two ways of looking at this. Are customers abandoning beef producers or are beef producers so stuck in a commodity mentality that they are willing to pass on a growing market segment?

Laura Rance is editor of the Manitoba Co-operator. She can be reached at 204-792-4382 or by email: laura@fbcpublishing.com

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 12, 2013 B6

-submitted by Gareth

 

Walmart and Gap: End Deathtraps Now!

The latest in a series of preventable factory disasters in the Bangladesh garment industry occurred on October 8, 2013. Yet again, Walmart and Gap are responsible and must be held accountable.
Hundreds of workers were inside the Aswad Composite Mills factory when the fire broke out. Eight workers were killed and 50 were injured, some critically.
Aswad is one of 23 factories owned by the Palmal Group, which Walmart and Gap have praised as a top supplier. According to the Worker Rights Consortium, workers and management at the factory said that Walmart was the largest customer of the factory at the time of the fire – they had been producing for the company’s George brand. Reporters onsite uncovered documents of Gap, Walmart and other brands.
Walmart now owes compensation to the victims of three major factory catastrophes that have taken place in the Bangladesh garment industry within the past year. This is no coincidence. Walmart’s “always low prices” approach has helped create a garment industry of low wages and low safety standards in Bangladesh. As the second largest buyer of clothing from Bangladesh, Walmart bears a major responsibility to clean up the industry from which it has greatly profited.
While 90 other companies have joined together in the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, an agreement between companies and unions, Walmart has refused. Instead, Walmart teamed up with Gap to create a corporate-controlled program that is hardly more than a facelift of the programs that have failed Bangladeshi workers in the past. Meanwhile, the death toll continues to climb. Please take action now – join with us in calling on Walmart and Gap to stop putting profits over people’s lives.

CLICK HERE TO VISIT WEBSITE WITH PETITION.

- submitted by Bev 

Feast For Friends, Sept 21

Mike has submitted this photo from the Feast For Friends event, held at the Sandy-Saulteaux Spiritual Centre on Sept. 21.  If you look carefully, you'll find a number of familiar faces in the circle.

Spinning tragedy: The true cost of a T-shirt

A Globe and Mail's months long investigation results in a lengthy report by Mark MacKinnon and Marina Strauss in today's Report on Business.  A number of excerpts are posted here, but you can read the entire report BY CLICKING THIS LINK.  The report begins by returning to the tragedy at Rana Plaza.

MARK MacKINNON AND MARINA STRAUSS

SAVAR, BANGLADESH and TORONTO — The Globe and Mail

At about 8:30 a.m. one morning in April, a generator rumbled to life at Rana Plaza – rattling the building, as it always did when it started.
Work had just begun at the welter of garment factories when the power went out. So a manager on the seventh floor, home to the New Wave Style factory, was quick to stand up as the lights went back on and announce that the building was safe. Everyone should continue doing their jobs.  But this time, Rana Plaza didn’t stop shaking.

“He died on the spot as he was announcing that we should keep working,” Raehana Akhter recalls. Then she fell, too. “It was like stepping into an elevator [shaft]. I felt this feeling in my stomach, and then everything fell.”  When she landed, Ms. Akhter, a 22-year-old mother who worked as a quality control officer for about $2 a day, was in complete darkness, with her left leg trapped under shattered cement.  “The ceiling was just here,” she says, putting her hand about 30 centimetres above her face. “I felt like this would be my little grave.”
..........

Excerpt 2
As garment factories have pushed into new markets in search of ever-cheaper labour, the apparel industry has become perhaps the ultimate symbol of two decades of globalization. Once a cornerstone of Canadian industry on Spadina Ave. in Toronto and Chabanel St. in Montreal, the manufacturing of clothing now ties together Western consumers and distant Asian workers in a cycle driven by trends and budgets that change with the seasons. No product better represents how our economy has been altered than the global tee, the fashion basic that’s sold for miraculously cheap prices, sometimes just $5.

A child is seen in a residential area adjacent to the Dignity Knitter garment factory in Sa’ang District, Kandal province, Cambodia. Factory workers rent small rooms in the compound – which has one water pump and four squat toilets – for just a few dollars a month. (Photo source:  Lauren Crothers for the Globe and Mail)

As The Globe and Mail found during more than two months tracking such T-shirts – from the cotton fields of China to the gleaming offices of Hong Kong and Singapore, to factories in Cambodia and Bangladesh and back to Canadian stores – supply chains are increasingly fragmented. Production leapfrogs from city to city. Middlemen outsource to other middlemen. Governments make bold claims but few checks on safety. And the consumer knows little about the long and tortuous path journey of that T-shirt to the store – only that it has become far more affordable than it ever used to be.
Yet as the ties between countries have become stronger, accountability has become a loose thread. The Globe’s investigation shows how companies such as Loblaw place their orders through middlemen, who in turn source work to a network of far-flung factories. The retailer whose shelves are stocked with cheap T-shirts in many cases does not know where in the world it or its materials is going to be produced when an order is placed. Inspecting buildings and working conditions has been beyond the retailer’s scope.
..........
Excerpt 3
No one personifies the middle man more than Bruce Rockowitz.
The 53-year-old – originally from Vancouver – is the chief executive officer of Li & Fung, the industry’s largest middleman.
After moving to Hong Kong from Canada in 1979, Mr. Rockowitz co-founded his own trading house – and outbid established players to land major American clients. Soon, one of those established players, Li & Fung, founded in 1906, bought up his company and asked him to head up the firm. (The first non-Fung to do so.) Since then he’s expanded the company’s network to 15,000 factories across Asia.
Along the way, the gregarious Mr. Rockowitz has also become a billionaire, married a local pop star and, when he’s not working at the glass-clad LiFung Tower, is seen driving a blue Bentley with a “Rock 8” licence plate around the city.
But that flash shouldn’t deflect attention to his real power over the supply chain. He works with such industry giants as Wal-Mart and Tommy Hilfiger. Hudson’s Bay Co. has Li & Fung manage much of its apparel outsourcing. And Loblaw and Joe Fresh are another client.
Twice a year, designers from Joseph Mimran & Associates, the creators of the Joe Fresh line for Loblaw Cos. Ltd. (Mr. Mimran is the “Joe” in Joe Fresh”), travel to Asia clutching precious cargo – the next season’s designs – which are then passed on to factory bosses.
Those bosses say that when deals are consummated, middlemen generally take about 5 per cent of the contract’s value from each side.
To Mr. Rockowitz, the logic of outsourcing the outsourcing is inescapable.
“Retailers are very focused on opening stores, marketing, designing product,” he says. “We focus on the supply-chain aspect, the sourcing side, the logistics side, and then creating brands they don’t want to do in-house … basically, doing what our customers don’t want to do, so that they can focus on growing their business.”

THE ENTIRE ARTICLE CAN BE READ HERE.

-Submitted by Kathleen

Better Beef - A&W Canada ... REALLY?

Image-source: awbetterbeef.ca

I'm not sure about this, and am interested in your thoughts.  A few days ago, a little flyer landed in our mailbox from A&W.  Along with the usual coupons (e.g. $4 Uncle Burgers and $2 Mama Burgers), there are a number of pages with messages like:
"Our 100% Pure Beef Guarantee - Raised without any added hormones or steroids, no preservatives or additives ... Ethically and sustainably farmed", and statements like:  "We pride ourselves on sourcing beef from ranches with a strong ethical commitment to both the environment and their cattle."

Images of free ranging, pasture-fed cattle abound in the flyer.  So I googled "Better Beef" and looked up "awbetterbeef.ca".  It's quite a little film, including interviews with 3 beef producers in Alberta, Montana and Australia.  It all sounds very good ... but, is it credible?  I don't know.  At the very least, it is interesting that a long-standing and main-stream burger seller like A&W is going out of its way to describe itself this way.  At best, it's an amazing shift toward ethical food-production.  I'm interested in your thoughts.

submitted by Gareth